Medical marijuana dispensary Maui Grown Therapies holds first of two open houses

Saturday, April 8 was the first of two open houses that Maui Grown Therapies will hold at its soon-to-be-open location in the Maui Lani Center.

The new location looks a lot like a regular doctor’s office, with a waiting area (known as the “Ocean Room”) featuring calming music and magazines for clients’ reading pleasure. The rooms were all hardwood floored, decorated with high-resolution photos of marijuana, and the whole place was very zen. In fact, it felt like a spa. But once you get past the first room, there are a few features you won’t find in your regular medical office.

The second staging area has a glass window where clients will present their medical marijuana license to the attendant. This hallway is fitted with a lockdown system, which can remotely barricade the doors in case of a robbery. The entire building is also covered with bulletproof glass.

After the card has been recognized as valid, the client is welcomed into the next area; a physician’s office where the staff and doctors take you through the different strains of cannabis available, as well as their differing usages. All of the Maui Grown Therapies’ plants are grown on island and tested by third party labs for their terpenes, CBD and THC levels, thus creating a chemical profile for each “bud” to match the patient’s needs.

After decisions on medicine have been made, the client is walked into the fourth and final area of the facility–the green room. This is where all the different marijuana capsules, oils, flowers, lozenges, creams, tinctures and buds will be kept–again, it’s all protected by bulletproof glass.

During the open house, the staff played a short video for the guests that detailed the list of doctors and scientists working as part of their team. Donald Abrams, M.D., chief of Hematology and Oncology at San Francisco General Hospital recently joined the medical advisory team and cannabis expert Michael Backes–author of Cannabis Therapy: The Practical Guide to Medical Marijuana–will train staff on the array of medicinal uses for cannabis.

During the open house, the team at Maui Grown Therapies made one point very clear: this is not a head shop. They insist that this is a completely legitimate medical establishment specializing in the wide variety of benefits available through cannabis therapy.

The majority of the attendees were seniors or people with physical ailments. The staff also mentioned the clinic would not sell edibles–brownies, cookies, etc.–but if it suites the needs of a patient, the clinic will offer helpful advice on how to make edibles at home.

The next, and final open house will be on April 22, 2017. The clinic itself will open sometime this summer.